In LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold goes to Mr. Pizza Factory in LA Koreatown. Yummy.
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Mr. Pizza Factory Goes LA
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on January 31, 2008 at 5:43 pm, filed under Asides, Korean Culture, Korean Diaspora. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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24 Comments
For some reason, I don’t think Americans are going to buy into the sweet potato crust.
Dude, the sweet potato crust is good.
Sweet potatoes have no business anywhere near or God forbid, on a pizza.
I’d rather not.
people in this country seem to think it’s okay to put all kinds of crazy shit on pizza, which is their privilege, of course.
what slays me is how pissed off many of these same people get at how i eat, cook, or cut my galbi or samgyupsal, or how i eat bibimbap, or how i like my kimchi, or any other number of ways that i do korean-style things in the “wrong” way…
@5:
I could never quite figure that out. I mean, if I am the one eating it and I paid for it, what business is it to them the way I want to eat my meal? I found it rather odd and weird and most of all, annoyingly offensive as hell when I would like to have my rice separate from the soup, but then while eating they would reach over and dump all of my rice into the soup. Then again, I don’t think Korean tastes are capable of appreciating ingredients for each’s unique flavor. They’d rather just mix it all up in a bowl and throw gochujang in it. The wonderful varied tastes of Korean cuisine for you.
The Korean potato pizza with the sour cream topping is good. The sweet potato variety is bad.
Jonathan Gold is an L.A. treasure. He’s been a great writer for years.
Korean pizza is fine; just wish they would use tomato sauce! Crust and toppings and cheese do not make a pizza. Pizza needs sauce.
#8,
True that. If they can only be as generous with that one important ingredient as they are with their baked spaghetti (which I love btw).
I have no idea what your problem is with the sweet potato.
People have actually gotten pissed off at you for eating the wrong way?
Everyone’s got their own taste. On the other hand the sweet potato they use on their pizzas and pastries taste like they’ve come out of a raisin. It’s got a reduced in the sun kinda sick sweet taste that makes my teeth float and my gut roil.
I know Robert, what’s wrong with bundiggae and boshintang? As long as it’s in front of you, absolutely nothing.
I like a manhattan style pizza myself. Lots of garlic, thin and not flopping around overweighted like a mudflap.
Robert,
I have no problems with sweet potatoes, as long as they’re sitting in a bowl by themselves, next to the turkey or roast
To me, the taste of sweet potato clashes with what I associate with pizza ingredients; tomato sauce, cheese, garlic, pepperoni, mushrooms etc…it’s like sprinkling a bag of Hershey’s Kisses on the pizza before baking. Personal preference, is all. My wife and daughter both love sweet potato in pizza crust and on the pizza and I’m sure you could find someone who’d drool over the afore-mentioned Hershey’s Kisses concoction.
To each his own! Sounds pretty damn good. Def gonna try it out next time I’m in L.A.
I can see how people can view it as unappealing bc I once had a Chinese girlfriend who used to put all types of untraditional ingredients when cooking Korean food for me. For instance, she’d put broccoli and bokchoy in my dwenjangjjige which wasnt so bad but it sure didnt taste right.
Does this mean Mr. Pizza employees are a heartless bunch?
NewYorkTom, I’m assuming you’re in New York. Don’t bother. You have access to some of the best pie in the world. You’d be disappointed.
@10 never seen anger for not eating the local food properly? My best experience with this phenomenon was when I was in Beijing about a year and a half ago at a Beijing Duck restaurant. I was making a 쌈 and added, as I sometime like to do with Korean BBQ, a little bit of rice. Before I could get the thing into my mouth a Chinese lady from two tables away rushed over, alarmed, and told me that I was doing it wrongly… rice does NOT go into the 쌈. She wasn’t mean, but her shocked and concerned reaction and subsqequent explanation of how to properly eat the dish made me afraid to deviate (until she left my table).
Come to think about it, she spoke pretty good English too… maybe Gordon Brown was right and there ARE 300,000,000 great English speakers around the Middle Kingdom?
My friend had the soysauce he was putting on his rice whisked from his hand and placed on a distant table.
Freedom to put corn on pizza is license not liberty.
I was eating in a JAPANESE restaurant in Korea, making my own sushi: the raw fish was there, as well the rice. When I was about to eat, the korean buddy by my side took it from my plate, wrapped around kimchi and said: “now it’s MUCH better! Now you can eat it!”.
My reply was simple: “you turned the sushi into a korean thing. Enjoy it yourself”
What the heck??? Similar to the sweet potato aspect, this is another example of “bastardization” (I saw this word either here or in Occidentalism).
Destroyed my sushi…
#11: yes, that was not an exaggeration or a typo. pissed off…
people here where i’ve lived for the past four and a half years frequently don’t appreciate and/or get miffed at my sometimes adventurous ways of eating korean food.
I actually am tickled by the entry of Mr. Pizza and Paris Baguette into the U.S. More power to them…more choice benefits all. Too bad the prices at the U.S. outposts are higher than the ones here.
However, that’s a good point about how orthodox some Koreans can be about how Korean food is “properly” eaten. I’ve lost count of how many times a waitress has told me exactly how 삼겹살 is to be cut in order to achieve the proper “씹는 맛”, or the exact proportions of the various types of 간 that go into each kind of soup, or that certain foods absolutely cannot be eaten unless they are first dipped into a prescribed kind of sauce. The insistence of many Koreans on that last one drives me batshit crazy.
One of my favorite things to do when at a 고기집 is to take one or more of the raw green peppers they serve and place it with the meat and garlic to be roasted. That _never_ fails to draw a comment from the waitress.
In that context, it is funny if Koreans do not grasp the same sort of reactions to canned corn, chestnuts, and sweet potatoes on pizza, not to mention sugared garlic bread.
Robert, the problem with sweet potato (or potato) on pizza is not only the clash of the taste (as one poster noted), it is the fact that it creates a carb overload.
Speaking of carb overload: Now Budea-jjigae houses serve noodles, rice cakes, rice, macaroni salad, tater tots and rolls in one meal.
I know the manager there. He tells me that he get’s a lot of non-Koreans come from the Ramada hotel across the street. They apparently like it and have hit him up for some franchise information.
My take? It’s okay. In my opinion the sweet potato crust works since they arrange the flavors in a way that doesn’t taste like a traditional American style pizza with all that tomato sauce and cured meat.